This is a living history interview with Carl Kaye, class of 1953, conducted by Marilyn Summers on April the 21st, the year 2004. We are at his home in North Palm Beach, Florida, and the subject of our interview today, his life in general, his experiences at Georgia Tech. Mr. Kaye, it's just a pleasure to be here today in your beautiful home. Thank you so much for coming here to meet with us today, taking time out of your busy day. And I want to know where your story began. So tell me where you were born and when. All right. I was actually born in West Palm Beach, Palm Beach down here. So this is a whole place. And I lived here my whole life. And what year were you born? 1903. Okay, 1903. So you were a depression baby. You came the same time the depression came to this country. I did. And, of course, my parents were, my dad had built the gas, had been the engineer that built the gas plant here in 1925 for Stone and Webster, and he had been doing well during the boom there, and they had suffered some economic loss in the stock market there when Morgan decided to let the market seek its own level. But he had a good job with a major utility holding company. He was the general manager, and so we had a pleasant childhood growing up here. Tell me, were they from this area, too, or where had they come from? My mother was from Michigan, grew up in the Grand Rapids area in Greenville. Her dad was a lawyer, they graduated from Harvard at some time, and then for some reason they had bought land over in the Michigan area, lumbered it, and then they went into farming. So, she was one of twelve children, so actually she was one of fourteen, but only twelve actually survived. And your father's family was from? He was from New Bremen, Ohio, which is a little town in Ohio north of Cincinnati. So they were Midwesterners that made their way down to Florida. Absolutely. And there's a lot of Midwesterners here now. But they came very early in the game. They came very early, actually. There wasn't much of Florida developed at that time, so they were early people here. They were. But, of course, Palm Beach, well, they were early because, you know, the things that you kind of hear of is Meisner and all of that stuff had really gotten started about the same time. Palm Beach and the Everglades Club and things that were built really in 1925 and into the 30s. Must have been just beautifully pristine at that time. Well, it was. Believe it or not, the bay was, all the sewerage ran, the raw sewerage ran into the bay directly. The way the sanitation systems were such that there was a heavy tide that flushed it and the population was a low enough number that actually it was uh did you have brothers and sisters no not that i know of i was an only child i was born after my parents had been married 16 years you were a surprise only child and they used to call me their mystery man i did surprise them and i didn't fully understand that for a long time the mystery man their mystery man right so you went to elementary school right there i did down uh you know west palm beach and And some of the schools are still there, and actually the home that I grew up in in Dyer Road has the people that bought it after my mother died. It eventually got declared a historic, it was typical of some of the homes that were built at that time. Oh, how interesting. And so that's there. It has a plaque, and probably it won't be torn down. Oh, that's wonderful. That's in the El Cid area of West Point Beach. Were you a good student? Did you like going to school? Well, I certainly liked going to school. My mother had gone to the State Normal College at Ypsilanti in Michigan. My dad graduated from the University of Michigan, so they were both educated. And they wanted me to be a good student, actually. My dad was an engineer and always liked all kinds of mechanical things, so we had a lot of electric trains and had a lathe that we'd gotten when the vice president of General Motors died in Palm Beach. So we had a hobby shop, and it, you know, but I wasn't, I had a little difficulty reading. It wasn't, I think, so much, anyway, I made reasonably good grades, but I didn't make, when I began to know I had to go to college, then my senior year I made pretty much straight age, but before that I didn't make really good, I made C's and B's and you know. But the point being is that you enjoyed it, you didn't dread going to school, and as an only child you probably liked the socialization of going to school, being with other kids and doing things. Well sure, and my mother was very protective of me, so I swam and I played tennis, but she kind of, a relative of hers had been, died as a result of a football injury university in Michigan. Oh, so she didn't want you playing sports, huh? And so she kind of protected me. Yeah? She said you weren't going to do that. Well, they just steered me towards the band, you see, and so that's how I got into the band. So were you in the band? But I played the piano, too. They gave me piano lessons twice a week. Were you in the band in high school? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So that was a – And I was the lead trumpet in high school, and, you know – So you didn't feel deprived? No, and, you know, I went to the Orange Bowl one of the years at Georgia Tech. You know, Georgia Tech, just prior to my going there, had a really good football team, you know, because they'd come out of the war, and they played in the Orange Bowl several times, and my high school band went down for that. So you had your first exposure then to Georgia Tech. Oh, yes. Now, your parents raised you to believe you would go to college. Oh, absolutely. Did they try to influence what school you were going to go to? How did you end up at Georgia Tech? Oh, well, my mother, you know, made an effort to, She was always, since I was an only child, she was very interested in the Stanford, Leland Stanford story, where they had this one son, and then he died at 17, and they built the university. And so she, you know, was interested in Stanford, but it was a two-day trip out there by train, maybe three. And then Carnegie Tech had this Westinghouse scholarship program that you could compete in, and I competed in that. I don't really know. I didn't win the scholarship, but I didn't. And then, obviously, there was MIT. And the truth is, is that as far as I know, as far as I know, I was accepted that, you know, if your parents could pay the tuition, it wasn't like it is now. Really, in high school, I took the SATs, but I don't know what I made But nobody ever, you know, really complained about one way or the other. So that went to Georgia Tech because they were close. And I think that my mother had found out that at the time, this is 1948, that they were rated number three, or at least in the first three. And they were close to home. For engineering. For engineering. And they actually were relatively small. I think the day school attendance was only like 4,500 or so. Yeah, that sounds about right. So when we went to look at it, why, gee, the professors had been there, and they still kept the student roles, you know, just like in high school. Yeah. So your mother thought it looked like they didn't come from home. And my mother thought that was probably going to be okay. Yeah. She wasn't going to throw you into the wild. You were going to be accessible there. I wouldn't be so far away from home. So what's your earliest memory of coming to Tech? Oh, wow. I can remember when I showed up there and first got in the dormitory and actually, you know, there were a lot of young people right around me. Another couple people from here had gone, Robert Allen, Bob Allen and Richard Robinson. And actually they were in Brown Dormitory and actually Richard Robinson's roommate, now you were looking for somebody that's a name, John Young, was the astronaut, was his roommate. How fun was that? That's when John Young started, at the same time in the fall. Little did we know where he was going to go. Little did we know. That's right. In fact, I was down. Who was your roommate? Who was your roommate? My freshman year, I can't – oh, it was a Bill Kaler from Miami, a Florida boy. So another Florida boy, yeah. And he was in Hal Dormitory, I guess. In those days, when you came in 1948, the G.I. Bill had let in a whole bunch of veterans, enabled a lot of, really, what we call gnarly old men, although they weren't very old, they'd already been out and fought the war, and they came back to school. And you were coming in as a, what, 17, 18-year-old? I came in as 17. Yeah, so there you are. You're still a kid, you know. And there's these tough guys all over the place. Do you remember this? They weren't really tough, actually. Actually I pledged a fraternity and there were a number of these guys that were already there for, you know, that were in Kappa Sig. And my father came up, a friend of my dad's was Kappa Sig, you know, anyway my father came up and met some of the different fraternity people and actually they were very mature Well, they were mature. It was a kind of a comfort to these, you know. Well, you were well looked after. They were going to keep you on the straight and narrow, that's for sure, right. But it was an unusual circumstance, just that period of time, because that was happening in schools all over the country. Well, it caused me to – I thought I wanted to be an electrical engineer, and my father was an electrical engineer. And I started out in electrical engineering, and I liked chemistry well enough, because I'd had a very elaborate chemistry set up in high school, you know, where it used to be that from Fisher Scientific or something, you could just buy all these LMR flasks and florent flasks and beakers and, you know, retorts and all the chemicals, and you could make all the different color fires and, you know, a boy's own book of chemistry, and so it wasn't like you just had this little chemistry set. So I like chemistry, but I also liked an electrical engineer, and my dad had been an electrical engineer. We actually in high school built a Tesla coil, like Tesla was a very famous inventor like Edison. And we could shoot sparks 12 or 15 inches and light, just light, fluorescent tubes. So anyway, I started out electrical engineering. But what I really found out was that, gee, all the people coming back from the services were all over, a lot of them were over in the electrical engineering department. So the very best paying jobs were probably in the chemical engineering because the oil companies were doing well, the chemical companies. And so I went ahead and made the switch after my second quarter in my freshman year. And that was traumatic because you had to take German, you see, and you've got to remember that language wasn't one of my favorite things. So you were setting yourself up there for something. That's right. Were you academically prepared for Georgia Tech? Well, let me tell you about that because you'll like that. People, you know, I thought that Georgia Tech really did a nice job with that. When you get there in the old days, they got in the gym, you know, and there were only like, well, the whole school was only 4,000 of us, like maybe 1,000 of us, and they basically said, well, you know, halfway through the year, half of you are going to be gone, the famous statement, see. Did it worry you? Did you think, oh, I don't want that to be me? No, no, I knew that one way or the other I was going to be there, see. But I didn't, And you know, so then they gave you all these exams, and I didn't have to take any remedial courses. But I thought it was a great program, because they got these little Georgia boys and Tennessee boys in the South, you know, necessarily their fathers weren't engineers, so they maybe . . . They weren't prepared. They weren't prepared. And so Georgia Tech wasn't trying to throw them out first cut. They just ran the remedial courses, I didn't have to take any remedial courses. But, you know, then most of the people that were in your class were kind of prepared. I did – I was a little shocked, though. There was a Dr. England that was in the English department, and that was taught in the old administration building that had these really rough floors. I mean, you know, they'd been there since – 1888. 18-something, see. And so, of course, you'd walk in the building, and you'd see these very rough floors, But he was very nice and the first thing you're supposed to do is write an essay. So I wrote an essay and it was supposed to be about my summer and I had a sailboat when I was in high school and I, you know, I told him. But anyway, he thought that my writing was poor and he gave me an F on that first essay. Oh no, what a blow. I got a C in English, but I did end up making like a 3-4 something my first semester. That's outstanding. Well, that is, considering, but I didn't make that – I wanted to make that junior, I mean that freshman honorary that took a 3.5, see, but anyway, English kind of held me back. I made a double A in swimming. They had swimming in those days. Was it Freddie Lanoux? Yes, it was, and on top of that, there were no girls, so nobody bothered with bane suits. They didn't want to have to dry out the bane suit, so you go in, and everybody, including all the coaches, the whole place was *****, you know, and we were swimming. Well, you were used to the water. You grew up on it. Oh, I made it. In those days they had a double A. I made a double A in swimming. I mean, I made perfect. There have been many grown men who have looked me in the eye and told me they nearly drowned in Freddie Lanou's class. Some people had never been in the water before. Well, that's it. And they did that bobbin stuff and then they'd tie your hands. I can remember this one guy screaming and I was just standing there. I had him by the arm holding him up and Lanou said, I looked over at the coach and I said, what do you want me to do with him? He put him back down. He was famous. Yeah, so anyway, we were going to let him drown. He was kind of screaming, though. Well, we don't think anybody ever drowned. There's a lot of rumors to the contrary. No, I don't. Not that I know. Nobody drowned in my class, anyway. But on the flip side of that, many people have told me that the drown-proofing saved their lives. when they've been in hurricanes or, you know, Etsy or whatever, and it really did save their lives. Well, you know, by the end of the thing, you were supposed to swim a mile, which took you about an hour or something, with your pants on. And then at the end of it, well, you took your pants off and you tied a knot in the two legs like they might have taught a Navy guy to do. And then you blew them up by getting air under them, and you put your arm through the pant legs and made a life for them. You could actually float for hours and hours. Yeah, without a life jacket, so they keep you up in the water. Yeah. He was a wonderful character. There's no doubt about that. Well, he invited me to be on the swim team, or to try out for the swim team, and I should have done that. But I was in the band, and it appeared that if you played the first three chairs for the trumpet, why, you could get a band scholarship. So it was the one after. The scholarship, where all it paid was just your out-of-state tuition, which was a gigantic $164 a quarter. But still, at that time, that was money. But that was money. My parents wanted me to do well in the band. I wanted to concentrate on doing my homework. But I should have done for the swimming. And the other thing was, I should have gone out for the ROTC rifle team, see, because I'm actually – it was a good shot. Yeah. In retrospect, we can think of those things. I could have done a little of each if I'd have, but most of the time I was at Georgia Tech, I was working absolutely to my – I was tired. Top capacity for focus. See, when I go back and I look at the kids and I say, God, I should have been having fun when I was there. You were focused. Yeah, I was trying to do well. A little pressure there, huh? Just a little pressure. Yeah, well, I was an only child and my parents, you know. They had high expectations of you, yeah. Exactly. Now, you went out for the band, freshman year. Went out for the band. And did they have a separate freshman band from the regular band or was it all together? No, I had the regular band and the biggest problem with it is it took a lot of time because it was a marching band. Oh, so you had to learn drills. a week, so you practiced the drills, you know. And then you did go on trips, which was nice, only I took 21 and 23 hours. Whoa, those are heavy schedules. Chemical engineering had a very regimented course to get through in four years, and there were a lot of labs, see. Chemical engineering had a lot of labs that you got one hour for. And so I had always had Saturday classes. I was on the Dean's list, I think, the whole time I was at Georgia Tech. But I never cut, because it was so much more trouble to study than it was to go to class. I always went to class. It was much easier. Take that high road. Who was the band director? Mr. Sisk, I said. Ben Sisk. And you said, when we were talking earlier, that he actually was the local high school band director, too. Right. And he would come over from the local high school, I guess, you know. And he had some of the students were band assistants and stuff, and they would make up the little sheets so that everybody knew what your number was and where you were, what yard line you went to after each maneuver. Those were pretty intricate patterns that you had to produce on time, keep your mind on the music, and it was in the stadium usually, wasn't it, between games, halftime shows, that type of thing? Mm-hmm. Fun! Oh, well, yeah. It was just that I was so busy trying to study. But anyway, I was in the band, and I enjoyed that. Did they have uniforms then, the white uniforms? Oh, yeah. They had that yellow and white uniform that had a white coat with kind of a trim around it. I can't remember exactly. I've got a picture of myself in that uniform. In that uniform, huh? You wore it proud, as they say. Absolutely. And football was a pretty big deal at Georgia Tech. football was a very big deal. They were very successful. They were always in the nuts****. You came at the prime time because that was Bobby Dodd's golden years. That was Bobby Dodd. In fact, there was someone here, I'll think of his name in a minute, but he actually rented a room. Coaches weren't that highly paid, but actually Bobby Dodd rented rooms. To students? For students. Oh my goodness. And I'll think of his name here. A little extra income for him. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, he developed those teams, the team of 51 and 52 were championship teams, remarkable teams. Absolutely. Won everything in sight. And he was really good at molding them together and making a team out of these guys. No superstars, they were just all team players, so it was a very good time to be at school. Do you remember, well you must have played in the band then, right off the bat for all the games. The one I remember was somebody who was called Flash McKinney, and Flash McKinney I think was a line, but they kept wanting to, you know, the crowd liked him, and I guess in high school, the people from high school had known him, and they kept wanting Bobby Dodd to play him in the same position he played in high school, and they'd keep yelling out Flash McKinney for a halfback, you know. So I don't even remember what happened to him, but I roomed in the fraternity house with Buck Martin, who was a tight end, and Buck was a good player. Yes, he was a very good player. Ray Beck, George Morris, Leon Hardeman, all of those guys. Ed Gossage. The thing that was so unusual about that group was they were all scholars as well as athletes, and many of them were academic All-Americans. No, they did well. Yeah, they did really well. And everybody in Atlanta came out for the games, didn't they? I mean, you were playing before packed stadiums. Oh, absolutely. I don't think the stadium held – the west side had been, you know, must have been done years before, even years before I got there because the concrete was dark. But still, you know, the stadium wasn't nearly as big as it is now. No, but still it was jam-packed, and it was jam-packed with Atlantans, not necessarily Georgia Tech people. Absolutely. The idea was it was a big show in town. You know, we just went up last year for the Georgia-Georgia Tech game, and our company did a skybox. and some of our customers are from the University of Georgia. So what was neat is that you realize that packed with Atlantians, see. Well, the Atlantians, a lot of them are actually from the University of Georgia. So they're coming, you know, either way, you see. A lot of fun. The rivalry is always a lot of fun. It's kept on a good level. It's always a lot of fun. Mr. Kaye, what did you do for fun there, besides studying and playing in the band? What else was going on for you in those years? Well, they had the fraternity parties, and of course there were actually a lot of girls. The high school girls came for rush week and all that. So that was kind of dazzling. No, that was very pleasant. They had a nice show-to-soul program. I was an inspector in the dormitory, so I got my room free. I did eventually get a band scholarship, so my tuition was paid. So that was really very good. And then I ate at the fraternity house. And so I had a little annuity that my parents had taken out for me. And really, I saved the biggest part of that. So, you know, you just had to pay for your books. And then I ate at the fraternity house, which was lovely. You know, sometimes you could eat in Britton Hall, but really... Well, it's the time you went back. We had a number of people who prepared meals there, and that was very good. You had breakfast and lunch. I didn't continue to live at the fraternity house because nobody ever went to bed. There were people that were able to stay up a lot later than I was. You required some sleep, huh? Did you go to the Interfraternity Council dances? Oh, sure. That was part of it, too. Actually, the Metropolitan Opera came to the Fox Thither. The Fox Theater was beautiful at that time, and so I ushered for the, because I'd get to see the operas, and I went down to Macon, Georgia, dated a girl down there at one time, and did that a couple of times, but mainly just stayed in Atlanta and dated some of the local girls there. It was a pretty good life. Oh, absolutely, and the professors were very accessible, and… Do you remember anybody by name? Well, Dr. Delavaugh was in the chemical engineering department, and I'm not quite sure what happened, and Dr. Weber was the head of the chemical engineering department. They were very accessible. So, if you didn't understand something, you could get an explanation? Oh, sure. And I'll tell you kind of one interesting kind of a story my sophomore year, actually Actually I had a, you know, if you're trying to have a 3-0 average, why C's are kind of a negative for you, because you've got to have an A for every C. And so when I got to Humanities, which I actually kind of liked, and this Dr. England is the one I remember, but there was a lot of reading, you know, and some people could, it wasn't that I can't read, I could read all the words, but it wasn't comfortable for me to read, I just couldn't read rapidly for some kind of visual coordination difficulty, apparently. But, you know, they wanted you to read the Iliad and the Odyssey, and they had Shakespeare and all this stuff. And honestly, if you can read real fast, Shakespeare's got a lot of clever things in it. But if you don't read well, Shakespeare is really a drag to try to read that stuff. So anyway, way, I wasn't making B's or better in English. I didn't realize it until years later, but I went through a bunch of the things, and my mother had written the head of the English Department at Georgia Tech, and I have that letter. And so I didn't realize this, but the head of the English Department told us Dr. England to focus on me, see. So I have a better understanding of literature than most people do. You know, my head is blooded but I'm bowed, you know. You were a concentrate, huh? Just a lot of things about what makes a story a Greek tragedy, you know, and the universality of events. So your mother was aware you were struggling with it and she went the extra yard. Absolutely. Well, she could be an excellent the reader. Gee, she would read, you know, if I couldn't get through a book in high school, she'd read it for me. So she was helping me out when I was in grade school. But you know, you find out that there is a universality. And I've often encountered English people, somebody will tell me, I have a home in Maine, and so in the summer we're up there, and the head of the English department in Andover, and some of these prep schools, you know, and I'll ask him about English literature and what he likes the best about it. But you know, there was this, there's a struggle all the way through in humanity of being the hero or the victim of your life, see, and the universality of events and the sense of predestination. Yeah. And really, those things, if you really understood that, well, when I was a sophomore more in college I'm not sure I totally comprehended it all but they were really trying to make sure that I understood that. Did you have a vehicle when you were there? Did you have a car? No. My parents thought that and it was probably economically more expensive that if I had a car that everybody would want me to drive them around. And they were absolutely right about that. So we really had to we had to rent a car and the cars were reasonably expensive to rent, relative to my available money. And the one thing I remember, it seemed like it was like 30 cents a mile or something for the car. And I remember that people would rent cars, and they'd put a bumper jack on them. I didn't realize you could do this. And all afternoon, they'd have this thing jacked up and running it backwards, because it actually would run the speedometer backwards. And then we could drive it extensively. Clever tech-wise. The reason I wondered was, you said you had a girl you dated in Macon, and I wondered how you would have ever gotten down to Macon. Well, let's see. I think I took the bus down there and hitchhiked back. Really? That was very dedicated, indeed. Yes, indeed. Very dedicated. Somebody picked me up right away, and when they found out I was a Georgia Tech boy, they took me right over to my dormitory. Whoever this guy was, I can't remember who that was. But, you know, I've heard other fellows tell me that they'd wear some tech thing, like a hat or a jacket or something, because people did take care of you. Oh, absolutely. And it turned out when I was in the service why America was a nice place. I drove from West Palm Beach to Texas one time and skidded off the road in a rainstorm, and the officer came and found out I was going to my first job in Houston, Texas for Humble. and there's some cars that stopped because they saw this. I hadn't crashed it. It just skidded off the road in the mud. And people stopped, and they all took off their shoes. And they pushed me out. They pushed me back up on the highway. Which you'd say a gentler, kinder society. Absolutely. I drove on out and took my first job with Humble Oil in Houston. You're going too fast. Let's back up a little bit now. We haven't gotten our first job yet. ROTC, you had to take two years. I took ROTC. Did you do two years or four years? Four years. All four years. And I got a commission. and the Chemical Corps. So that was a good experience for you? Oh, yeah. The ROTC was a great experience. You know, we had all of those people back from World War II, see, that had really seen some terrible things. Yeah. And they kind of wanted you to feel. You know, we had an armor officer there that I remember used to come in and of course nobody was used to it, but as soon as they came in you were supposed to call attention and stand up them. And he had a swagger stick and the other thing I remember about him was he'd slap it on a table and he'd say, shock, firepower, and mobility. That's the characteristics of armor, shock, firepower, and mobility. See, and you can see I always remember that. Yeah. I learned that in my freshman year with this RLTC officer. When we got in the service, I was at Fort Bragg, I'm at the 18th Airborne Corps and stuff, and we had some exerciser it was armor, and we always said that they'd shoot, move, and communicate. It's the same thing. Yeah, kind of the same thing, but you know, they'd shoot, and then they'd pull back, and they didn't stay in one place. Now, by the time you graduated, the Korean War, or Korean conflict— The Korean War had ended. It had ended. The Berlin Airlift had gone in like 59, so my dad, I didn't really have any—I didn't know anything about necessarily the military, but— Did you have a commitment to make in 53? I did. So everyone knew they had, what, two years was the commitment? Yeah. And because Korea had ended, a lot of people thought they wouldn't take a job just because they'd be going in the service. And gee, I had all kinds of trips, Griffin, Dean George Griffin. I just, I took all the trips, in fact I stayed an extra quarter, that's why I graduated in 53, take all the plant trips. I went everywhere, and I had just all kinds of job offices. And I'm told that I got the second highest salary offer in my class at Humble Oil, for Humble Oil in Houston. And how do you spell it? H-U-M-B-L-E? Humble? Humble H-U-M-B-L-E. They were taken over eventually by Exxon. So they came in, they interviewed. They came in. George brought them in on an interview. Yeah, and then you still got to go to a plant. Yeah, you know, they'd schedule interviews and then if you were interested in the company and the company was interested in you, you'd have a plant trip. And they'd pay all your expenses. And they paid all your expenses and you got to travel and I really, I went to City Service and Phillips, you know, the president of my class and I'm just trying to think of his name. He was a chemical engineer and went to Phillips and that was out in Bartlesville, Oklahoma And I thought, well, man, well, man, Bartlesville is not going to be something. He's still there. I know. And they had a, he was a basketball player. They had a basketball court. So if you like basketball, you're going to be fine. Pete Silas was his name. Do you remember him? Yeah, yeah. So your graduation time, when it came time to get out, was exciting. You had all kinds of opportunities. Well, I went to Humboldt and I asked for a deferment because, geez, they treated you like a young executive there. You met all the vice presidents and everybody at Humboldt, that was their headquarter. They were making a ton of money. They had the largest refiner in the United States at the time doing 260,000 barrels of oil a day. So they had a couple of cat crackers, which was new at that time. And so I thought, well, I guess I'm going to live in Texas and, you know, be in Houston. They had a 10-lane highway down to Galveston and not hardly a car on it, you know. Oh, my. I mean, five lanes in each direction, which was kind of dazzling. And I had a date when I went down there and drove out. We drove out on the beach and went around a jetty, and the tide came in, and then we couldn't get back. Yeah, so that was, of course, that little consternation. We didn't have cell phones or anything. You learned a lesson. But anyway, I... Know what the tides are? Yeah, I know what the tides are down in Houston, and so that was a good job. How long did you stay with Hubble? Well, I just stayed about two months because I asked for deferment. Instead, I got my orders. They signed me to 82nd Airborne, 18th Airborne Corps. So you were there so briefly. And my mother, you know, being an only child, she said, oh, no, I can't jump out of airplanes. So eventually I ended up, they sent me back to guided missile staff officers, of course. So it was a kind of, we had a two-star general that jumped into St. Iglesias. He was in charge of 18th Airborne Corps. Now, where were you stationed? Where was your training? Fort Bragg, North Carolina. So, I was there for about a year. And then, if you were in the division, you needed to jump. And so, because I didn't jump, well, I was in one of the Corps units. And so, one time I did something, got a chance to go to a briefing for the general, and I got to say something. And So later he told the Corps chemical officer that find a school for Kay to go to, maybe he'll stay in. So that was kind of nice. Yes, very nice. So this is at Fort Bragg now, a year out of college. And so I found a school, Guided Missile Staff Officers Program. See, the commanding general of 18th Airborne Corps was the leading unit of the United States. I mean, it was ready to go. That was a fine place to be, yeah. They were really going at it, training-wise and stuff. And they'd get up at 5.15 every morning and on and on. But I found a school that was for guided missile staff officers. It was intended originally because the Army owned Caltech and owned the White Sands Proving Ground and owned the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Huntsville. It was originally planned to give you an advanced degree in propulsion engineering at Caltech and you'd be at White Sands, and the Germans were all still there. I mean, you know. That was a great time. Yeah, North American was still, they'd brought the Germans back after war. So all those guys were there, the V-2 rocket, they still shot a few of those. Caltech had their little rocket section there, that Rocket Propulsion Lab, which is JPL now. And I was in the early days there. You've got to remember now, I'm out there in 1956. Sputnik wasn't put up until 1957, the Russians. Really, von Braun and those people wanted to put up something into orbit, see, but what happened out of it by the time I got there and ready to go to get lined up for school was that Eisenhower decided he didn't want to militarize space, so he tried to have NAA, which became NASA, but it was National Aeronautics Administration at the time, was trying to launch with a civilian group a satellite, and the two efforts that they made failed, and so eventually Von Braun got to launch it. I wasn't directly involved with that, but anyway, as a result, I stayed at Army-run schools rather than actually going to Caltech, but the thing I was going to tell you about that day was that's kind of neat. find a school that Kay will go to. I want to go to the guided missile staff officer's course. I found that. And you were supposed to be a captain, and you were supposed to be in the artillery. But anyway, the two-star general endorsed this thing. We sent it up to the Department of the Army, and it came back from the Chemical Corps. It disapproved. No requirement for a guided missile staff officer, you see. Well, this is kind of a fun story. People find this hard to believe, But the Corps chemical officer told me that the general was used to having things, you know, happen to see. He said, give him a three-day pass, tell him to drive up to Washington, stay at Fort Myers in Virginia, you know, the transit officers, BOQ. Go over to the Pentagon, forget the chemical corps, go over to the artillery branch. and uh so maybe they somebody we had a lot of artillery people uh called up and said i was coming but anyway i did that did what they said had a three-day pass drove up to put on my best uniform had good uniforms and i went to the pentagon the pentagon i found my way in there where the artillery branch was and sure enough they had a career management branch in there and this guy was very nice you know i mean i'm inside the pentagon yeah you know so they took And sure, and they said, you know, the captain that actually saw me, you know, I brought my school records, because I had some good Georgia Tech records, see? And they needed people at that time. Sure they did. Because remember, Sputnik hasn't been launched yet, and obviously there was a build-up in the missile area. So they wanted to have all this background, and so Georgia Tech had given me this good background in chemical engineering, that I was going to be a rocket scientist. So I got in there, and they said, well, it looks like you're qualified for this school, but come back tomorrow, and we'll let you know. I came back the next day, and I went around Washington, the museums and stuff, you know. I came back the next day. I had a branch transfer. Nobody had ever heard of that. I got transferred from the Chemical Corps to the artillery. See, that's what that Georgia Tech education did for me. And I had an assignment to school, but it was in the fall, see. So I got in the car, my old 1950 Dodge that my parents had given me, you know, because I didn't have to buy a car. And I drove back to Fort Bragg. Well, got back and everybody was dazzled. I mean, nobody got a branch transfer in a single day. So anyway, I was going to be accepted for school, and I stayed there for, and then came home for vacation, and then I actually drove, you know, back out with the old car out to El Paso. And started that, and that's how I got over into the missiles. So I never went back to Humble after that, see, because the missiles were really exciting stuff, and White Sands was fun. and as a result I went through about a year and a half of school and I was going to get a chance to teach at the guided missile staff officer guided missile surface to air school but there was a an officer that was taking a new Nike battalion brand new equipment that we were going to qualify and install it in the Niagara Buffalo Air Defense. So I was, he wanted me to go with them, and so they took me, and I had a girlfriend down there that I thought, well, I don't know that I liked her that much, but I mean, you know, I was going to teach in the school, and her family was well established down there, and they had a ski place in one thing and another. But at any rate, why, he wanted me to go with her as his missile officer, And so I went up to Niagara Buffalo with all this equipment after we had fired it at White Sands and qualified it, and that's the kind of story in itself. But that's where I met my wife, because my wife's father was the post engineer and the deputy post commander at Old Fort Niagara, and that's where we were stationed, right on the Niagara River in Lake Ontario. That's a cold place. That's a very cold place. A very cold place. Well, actually very cold, but I liked it because it was kind of fun. I got Seymour Snow than I ever seen in your life. I had about a hundred inches. But that's where you met Shirley then, so it was very fortunate that you took that. She was one of six children, and of course in artillery we had helicopters and a parade field and all this stuff. And we used to fly off in a helicopter, and we'd fly out around her house. I'd try to get her to come out. Oh, I love these sisters. She'd come out. She was giving me a bad time. She had a boyfriend that had a criss-cross speedboat on the mountain river. So you had competition then, huh? I had competition. Not only that, but you had a brand new, one of those Chevrolets or the wraparound windshield, you know, 1950, whatever. You know, that was kind of a classic year for her. Well, how long did it take you to winter down? Oh, about a year. But, you know, her dad liked me because I saw him all the time. You were in with the kids. I was in with the mother and father. Yeah. How long did you stay there? Did you initially marry right at that time? We stayed there until, I still wanted the Army to, my parents wanted me to come home because they were older and you know, and Pratt Whitney had built, I still was thinking the services sent me to school. But the thing about the services is that although they have some great schools, they also have career paths. And you need to be, if you're going to have, in the combat elements like artillery and infantry, they want you to command troops, they want you to have an overseas assignment. Oh yeah, you've got to go through all the groups. So if you stay in the military, although the schooling is nice and the equipment is exciting, I don't want to kill anybody, but I mean, it was exciting stuff. You had to take, and my parents didn't want me to go to Europe or Thule, Greenland, and so I resigned, and at the time, there were no wars going on. What year was that? It was 59. 59? I actually resigned. So I had been approved for captain, but I hadn't actually made it. I got it later when I got out. What year did you get married? I got married in 57. So you were married already by that time. So you married as military then? Oh, I had a, well you ought to see, I had, they said my marriage there at Post, we wrote around the Post on a World War I cannon, you know, they said that was a social event. The military, the peacetime military is, at least the parts that, you know, are not out in the fixed installations are very, you know, we We had beautiful, I've got support, we were the social event of the year. Yeah, so it was open space. We had swords. Oh, all the circumstances. All the whole thing, see, so great weather. So in 59 you resigned completely and went into industry again. Well, I came down to Pratt Whitney United Aircraft at the time. Now, they had offered you this position? Well, I had two jobs that I was interested in. I could have gone back to Humboldt, but by this time, you know, I liked all the missiles and all that kind of stuff. So, believe it or not, I interviewed at the Cape, because I wanted to be close here in Florida, and I was really offered a job as assistant superintendent of missile propellants. Now, that might seem like a big sounding job. Pan Am was running the Cape at Patrick, and I went up there several times and found a little house. They had some little houses that were actually on the water, little waterways up there in Merritt Island, and I'd be close to, and the guy that I was going to be working with I thought was smart, but my parents wanted me back down here. So, Pratt Whitney had built Florida Research Center and started in 57. And so I interviewed there and I got a job offered there, and it wasn't for quite as much money, but I had to come home, so I came back, and it was better than I did back. And you had tons of experience to bring to them, so they were very interested in what you were bringing to the place. Oh yeah, so I got into exciting stuff right away, and I did well at one time. I was one of their younger full project engineers, so I did well at Pratt Whitney. And you stayed at Pratt Whitney from 1959? I stayed 15 years. I stayed from 59 to 74. And let's talk a little bit about what happened in 72, prior to leaving there in 74. You started tinkering, didn't you? Oh, well, I had been tinkering all along and so the home that I grew up in had a sprinkler system. My dad ran the gas plant and of course they had pipe and stuff. So he was one of the few homes in West Palm Beach at the time had an installed sprinkler system. And we had a three horsepower pump that ran the whole thing at one time. And of course during the war the sprinklers would break and we had this lathe and I would make parts to fix the sprinklers. Or I'd even make some sprinklers that squirted water in one form or another because machining old worn out boiler feed pump piston rods or something, you know, we had some material and I could do it. It appealed to you. And my dad would tell me, you know, how neat that was. We'd squirt water and the water didn't cost anything because we were pumping it out of a well with a pump that we owned. And so I was kind of oriented to the sprinkler system, so I just thought that I had saved my money in the service and I actually bought a lot on the water. I knew I wanted to live on the water. I lived a block from the lake when I was growing up, but I knew, I built a lot of boats and stuff, and I knew I wanted to be on the water. So I bought a lot on the water and it was a half acre so I did my own sprinkler system. Although I was inventive and I turned in ideas before. Pratt Whitney had a program where you turned in ideas and if they filed a patent they gave you two hundred and fifty dollars. Okay so the idea was you created it but you took it to Pratt Whitney. You weren't going to file it for yourself. Well no, I thought that I had an employment agreement and actually I just thought thought that I had this thing working and that I'd get my $250 if they filed a patent on it. So I told them that it works and it's really a good idea. And they said, no, it's kind of outside our product line. And the man that came down from Hartford, they used to bring a patent agent down from Hartford once a month to file patents for anybody at the Florida operation, Jack McCarthy. I knew him for 40 years. He filed a lot of my patents. That's why I have so many patents, because I could get them filed, kind of as a moonlight thing with some of the people, see. But anyway, I turned this idea into the Patent Committee, and they said, well, it's outside of our product line. I said, well, it's really a good idea. But they said, well, we can probably get it released. I said, oh, well now, that was the first time I realized that absolutely everything didn't belong to Pratt Whitney. You could still do it, do it in your own name. Yeah, see, so they got me a release and I made a wooden pattern and got an aluminum sand casting made and machined it on the lathe and I had it in my yard. It was a real simple way of automatic sprinkler systems. Each time the pump turned on, just a rubber disc indexed inside of this housing, it was just a half-inch rubber disc on a shaft. When the pump turned on, it caused it to go from zone to zone. So each time your pump turned on, it ran a different zone. Well, it was an immediate success. So by the time I had retired from Fred Whitney or resigned, I was making $9,000 a month. Just on your one? I was making more, just on this thing, just on this one idea. So I didn't go out. And look for another job. You said, this is it. No, well, it just turned out that things were slowing down in the middle 70s when I left Pratt Whitney. And you founded your company, a manufacturing company, to build what you had invented. That's right. And that was really the smartest thing you could have ever done, right? You've got to believe it, because a lot of my friends who became president of the thing, they said, Carl, you did better than all of us. Because by doing that, you controlled the whole thing. you could create more inventions. Oh, absolutely. So you actually started the company, K-Rain, before you left Pratt. I did. On a small basis. And I had a partner that was making them, and eventually we separated and then kept on. And actually, they released another patent to me that was pre-irrigation. I sold it to Toro Company for a large amount of money, and they had guaranteed me a consulting fee and a minimum royalty. And so that's actually when I left. That's very interesting. Yeah, you had plenty of security. I not only had a little product line going, but I also had a big company. You see, my parents had always said, when I got out of the service I had these ideas for hydrophonics. And my dad said, well gee, you know, you're married and you have two children now. You've Now, a real job, a real job is a job with a big company, not a little company, you know. So I had never, I hadn't thought about quitting really. When I finally quit, I had some security. You were pretty confident. Yeah. Pratt Whitney liked me. I liked Pratt Whitney. It had just been exciting, you know, big corporations are, but I liked the people, you know, and and it was well run and there was a lot of advanced stuff going on and so I still like all the people. It was a great experience. It was like my Army experience. It was a great experience. It happened at the right time. But when I had the two things going for me, it was kind of tired. You knew you didn't need them anymore. You could do it on your own. Well, I didn't want to leave, but it was kind of slowing down. We had lost the space shuttle engine. I was the project engineer that, not the head of the program, but did the mechanical part of building a gas-dynamic laser device that at one time was the free world's highest power laser. So it wasn't my invention, but the research lab had come up with that. There were electric discharge lasers that Abco was doing, but Pratt Whitney He really was a pioneer in gas-dynamic lasers. Now, how does an inventor invent? Do you just sit around and say, hmm, what can I think of? Or do you have a shop where you just putz around with things? How does this happen? Well, my dad had two experiences, and this will be fun if you can listen to this real quick. My dad went to electrical engineering, took electrical engineering at University of Michigan. I think he got out in like 1913, 1914. working. And a man that went to college with him invented a watt meter, a thing for power, measuring power, you know like when the power company comes to read your meter. He had a patent on that and he had invented that, gotten a patent somehow when he was in school or in graduate school, and he took a career path that was different. He gave that invention to the Catholic Church and became a priest. Well, my father was religious, but he wasn't a Catholic, he was actually a Baptist, but he always knew this man very close. And over the years we would see him sometimes when he came down here to the retreat house. But he always knew something about inventions and he would take me with him. And he had some other friends that had done inventions. So somehow my dad was interested in patents and inventions. You were exposed to the possibility that way. Right. And they kind of told me about patents and obviously it looked like they made some amount of more money. That was like writing a book or something. Yeah, it was an option. So I was always interested in that. And the other thing is we had these eight or nine electric trains, and the idea was to try to run them all on the same track. And of course they didn't have radio controls at the time, so you had to sectionalize it. And my dad would come home and he'd say, now I want you to figure out how to run two engines on this same track without running into each other, see. So you know, electrically you'd have to figure out, when the engine was in one place, that it would turn off the current work somewhere else, see. Well, I never really totally got it all figured out. I mean, you know, I'd work at it and then he got busy and he wouldn't do it either. I'm working on my grandchildren now. I've got a train room over here. But, you know, so all the way along he was always encouraging ideas, see. So even in chemical engineering I was trying to, you know, but I didn't really think in chemistry. I can think better mechanically or electrically. I can do things electrically. Chemistry I don't think I ever fully underheaved, but there are processes. And I tried to invent some processes and replace the way they manufactured gas, but I never had a chance to play with that because I got over into the other sea. But anyway, Pratt Whitney was very encouraging of that. We were just doing new things all the time and so I was turning in lots of ideas. They didn't follow all that many of my patents but I do have a patent on lasers, gas dynamic lasers. I have a patent on injection elements for rocket engines and I'm told that that element is used in the space shuttle engine now. I don't get any royalties from it. Yeah, because it belonged to a patent. Yeah, and it's in the present space shuttle engine. So when you started KRain did you put yourself a tinker place, something to expand the product I just had this lathe, and I still had the lathe I had as a boy, but you can look at various ideas and try to figure out how they work, and a lot of times they don't always work exactly like you think they work, and as a result you end up having a different approach. Then you realize that when you do find out how it works, that well, now I've done it differently. Well, then you think, hmm, I kind of like the way I'm doing it better. But so, geez, it's like writers, you know, you wonder why they keep writing. There's always something else to it. There's always an idea. And then you think, ooh, that's kind of a good idea. And then my son or somebody will say, did you file that patent? Like we just were at a sales meeting and somebody was telling me a problem. And I said, oh, I think we can. You know, like in yesterday morning, they're saying, did you file that patent? Well, you know, now you can, we've got, we actually spend over $100,000 a year filing patents. We file lots of patents. Because you have to protect the idea. Well, it's not so much to protect the idea is because all those patents we're not really using. It's that they're related to what we're doing and we may like what we're doing better, but we don't want somebody else to do that either. The same thing. So it's a kind of a protective thing. Now when you put a company together, there's a whole lot of parts to that. You've got a product, so it has to be manufactured, and somebody has to market it, and somebody has to sell, and somebody has to keep accounting and books and all that. You start out with one partner, and you said eventually he left, and so you were just you. So I did the whole thing. I'd do the design, the mechanical engineering. You know, I'd sit down with a pencil and some drawing instruments my dad had, a little table that we'd had as a boy and I'd draw it out just like in mechanical drawing. I mean they do it on computers now but just like back and just like they did in the other days at Tragwood. So you were following on your background huh? They used to ask, are you laying lead? Well I was always over in project or advanced proportion or applied research. But in the design groups, you know, we did it with a pencil. But as you grew did you just start adding people and adding people? Well, right. Actually, to start out with, my wife and my two daughters and a girl down the street built some of the early clocks. They used to work at the plant. We just rented a warehouse, and we got some picnic tables, and we brought the parts in on pallets. That's very basic. And we set the pallets on the floor. I set my wife and daughters at the table, and they put it together. Isn't that amazing? Yeah. And then we'd, my wife would do the accounting and we did it with adding machines that she pulled a handle on, you know, and I'd be up at two o'clock in the morning. Sometimes she wouldn't do it unless I, you know, the kids got to bed and I'm staying with her. But we needed to get an invoice, see. I'd stay up one night just to force, to catch up, see. Isn't that amazing? Just catch up. If I sat with her, we'd get caught up, see. And I'd be two o'clock This is a lot of work. This is a lot of work. But it grew, and it grew, and you added a product line. Oh yeah, and it got more and more people, and we added products, and eventually the banks didn't like to lend money, so we never bought, you know, and I came from an frugal period, so we never borrowed a lot of money. What did it grow? If we owed $35,000, why that? I had lots of people that always showed up. I had a couple of investors that talked about, you know, they'd come with their chauffeurs and they'd pick me up and they'd tell me, they'd show me their bank book, they had $800,000, it was way back in the 70s or middle 70s, that they'd have $800,000 in a savings account. He'd say, I'll write you a check for, somehow Now I thought $50,000 was going to solve all my problems. Little did you know, huh? I did some projects and people doubled their money. I had some other inventions and we did put together some investment groups. But I never really liked the accountants and the lawyers. See, the wealthy people, the investors, would disappear. And then I'd be left with the lawyers and I'm the one trying to do it. I thought, well, if I'm the one that has to solve the problems, well, I might as well do it for myself. What did KRain grow into today? How many employees today? Well, we've got it probably about, collectively at different locations, we probably have about 300 employees. So you've grown it into a nice mid-sized company. Oh, yeah, and we're on a rapid expansion path, and the people want to buy us all the time. Yeah, you have to resist all that now. Do you still lay lead? Well, my wife's somewhat interested. The numbers are so dazzling that we're never quite sure they're really going to pay that much for it. You're still designing things, though. Oh, yeah. That's what I mean. In fact, we've got ideas. We've got one engineer with a master's in mechanical. We've got one with a doctor's in mechanical engineering. We've got about four engineers, and all of them are on computer, you know, we've got the pro-engineering and we can solid model. And for instance, I can tell you, as a product we're doing right now, is a two-inch solenoid valve, an electric-controlled valve, see. And the competition's valve at 160 gallon a minute has about a 17 psi pressure drop in that size valve. And the valve that I've designed only has an 8 psi pressure drop. So, I've designed a different way for the valve action to take place relative to the flow path, and we know about streamlining and recovering pressure going through the valve, see. There's just a lot of little things that people don't do. I mean, the big companies are off selling $100 million or $300 million, and we're off selling $25, $30 million, see, we're a good size now, we're on our way to a $50 million company. So, this has been so much fun. Well, I kind of enjoy it. All my friends here play golf. But you're having fun. Did I not get up this morning? I didn't know where they were coming. I got up this morning. Because that's what you do. Tell me about your family. All right. I have three children, two daughters and a boy. Let's start with your oldest daughter, Gretchen. Well, she's, I hate to say, she's like 45. Don't you have to tell us how old she is. The other daughter's like 43. My son's like 41. My son is the president of the company, been working in the company for a long time. He's had other jobs, but he's really been working in the company about fifteen years. Which is wonderful to have family. And the one daughter, both of the daughters got through law school and the one got a master's in tax at NYU and they went to the University of Colorado. And my son is a business finance major out of Florida State. You weren't able to get yourself a rambling wreck out of there, huh? Well, I tried to, and let me tell you, I paid more attention to the, you know, I was trying to earn a living at that time. Well, you've got plenty of grandchildren now. No, no, but to tell you the truth, Georgia Tech, you know, they slowly escalated the SAT requirements, see, and I didn't realize that, you know, if I really went up and talked to him. I knew the alumni, and I'd been up to the school a couple times. But I think it was better, Chip, to be at the top of his class in business and finance than to be struggling just because I went, you know, in engineering. Oh, yeah, everyone should do their own thing. You know what I mean. But we applied, and we didn't try to go back and force that issue. You've got lots of grandchildren. Oh, yeah, seven grandchildren. Yeah, maybe one of them. Six boys and one girl, oh yeah, and I told you that they, all of the grandchildren are, they're all, you know, like all the things we like. We've got a big 42-foot sailboat we've had for 20 years, so we sail, we've had horses and ridden horses, and we ride motorcycles, and they all still ride motorcycles. So it's the best life. Well, absolutely. It's the best life. And you saw, they're nice-looking kids. You have beautiful grandchildren and beautiful children and a beautiful home. Everything is really coming up roses for you. You're very fortunate. You've got to understand that. You've been blessed. You worked hard for it. Everything doesn't, you know, everything has it. But fortunately, nobody's been killed. We don't have any major health problems. Your mom and your dad would be so pleased. I think they would. How long did they live? Did they live long enough to realize your dream? Unfortunately, my dad died in 63, my mother died in about 71. I wish they had lived longer. They only lived long enough to see that you were settled though and you had children and grandchildren. Obviously my dad saw the three grandchildren, my three children, saw the little boy. So that gave them a lot of pleasure. Absolutely. They saw you become successful and knew that you had a stable place, something they worked so hard for. No, no, you said exactly. That was it. They wanted to be sure I was working for a real company. And stable. Had an education and worked for a real company. People that came through the Depression were often like that. Oh, absolutely. Their basics were just very critical. They needed to be assured constantly that you were going to have those things. Absolutely, and they were very hesitant to borrow money, and, you know, they had a satisfactory life. And they passed that on to you. And they were careful not to. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's been a very fortunate life. That doesn't imply that you didn't work hard for it. You certainly did, but it's wonderful to see a tinker, tinker, and come up with things that make everything better for everybody. Well, I appreciate that. We've got lots of new ideas, hearing aids, and child locator devices, and flashlights and batteries, and on and on. I don't know. It's not just sprinkling systems anymore, huh? Well, that's right. That's the bread and butter, but now comes the other thing. That's right. So, well, we're very grateful to you for taking time today to come tell us your story. It's been delightful, Mr. Tate. Well, gosh, Marilyn, thank you so much. It's been our pleasure, sir. Thanks again.